Nikon Explains Mirrorless Segment Forecast Cuts, Reveals New Strategy

Nikon also made forecast cuts for their high-end camera sales and operating income

Nikon cuts forecast for its mirrorless camera segment

A week ago Nikon released its second quarter financial results for the year ending March 31, 2014, which revealed important forecast cuts regarding their High-End camera sales as well as for the operating income.

Today, Nikon released a set of questions and answers from their financial results conference meant to clarify the current position regarding their interchangeable lens-type digital cameras as well as their future strategies.

When asked about the reason behind the lowered market forecast for their mirrorless segment, Nikon answered “The market in Japan has been favorable, but the market conditions in the U.S., Europe, China and Asia have been severe, and a downward revision of the market was made from 19.5 million cameras predicted last August, to 18.7 million.”

When it comes to future prospects for the mirrorless camera segment, Nikon stated that “We are keeping inventory of our digital SLR camera at the extremely low level. In the latter half of the fiscal year, we expect a shift from older products to newer products that have higher profit margins.”

These measures have an important impact in production planning as Nikon is trying to adapt to the constantly shrinking compact digital camera market. This descending trend reduced their overall sales and income to ¥28.5 billion [$290.22 million/€216.196] and ¥10.9 billion [$111.014 million/€82.685 million], respectively.

With an extensive lineup of high-end to entry-level digital SLR cameras and leading the DSLR market in various regions around the world Nikon said “We plan to maintain this product mix, but we will cut costs and ensure profitability by reducing the number of models.”

This new information comes after the revision of their estimated market size and the decrease of their sales forecasts as well as operating income by ¥30 billion [$305.552 million/€227.581 million] and ¥6 billion [$61.104 million/€45.522 million], respectively.